Wokay!

I forget how much I’ve told you about the massive floor battles that have taken place within my family. So here’s a quick recap.

Due to a judgment by the Supreme Court or the High Court, it isn’t feasible for us to move to Sainik Farms, and so we’re reconstructing the current house to make it more livable.

My bua has a fetish for pure white marble- the sort that Mughal despots used to make mausoleums out of. She thinks it looks simple, serene and elegant. The architect said that sort was obtainable from the Ambaji mines at 300 rupees per square foot.

My mother, on the other hand, hates pure white marble. She thinks it looks cold and dead- like a mausoleum, in fact. She respects marble as a material, but likes marble with green splashes and streaks much more. She thinks it looks organic, alive and welcoming. What she really likes, though, is wood- it looks warm. But since wood is not feasible for a climate where it hits forty Celsius in April, she had her eyes and mind on Italian Pergo tiles that looked like wood- being sold at 190 rupees a square foot in Greater Kailash II.

My brother, displaying the degradations two years of an education in DPS will afflict one one’s brain, suggested aluminum- light and strong. Evidently he didn’t consider ‘expensive’ and ‘hot as a handbag and a can of mace’ to be significant traits.

A compromise was reached. The entire ground floor would be floored with white marble, and the first floor would be done as my mother saw fit.

Subsequent research revealed that the Ambaji marble was not three hundred rupees per square foot, but, in fact, four hundred per square foot. If you have money, you might as well spend it building your dream home, but at this point it was looking as if we would run out of money after finishing the floors, and buying a few bricks. I began to have premonitions of living like Enya- sleeping in marble halls, with nary a bed in sight.

However, this week my female relatives visited the Makrana mines, and it appears that we are saved!

Bua found marble that was so white it looked like it had been washed with Surf, or possibly Rin Supreme. At this very moment she is probably fantasizing about having the Kapoors, whose drawing room she set as a benchmark asking themselves ‘Bhale Dr. Khanna ka marble hamare marble se safed kaise?’. What’s more, it was for 180 per square foot- more than half as cheap as the Ambaji.

Ma also picked up colourful marble for the first floor- my room is apparently to be done in a sixty-five rupee per square foot beige-pinkish marble with hints of orange. Yow. But she assures me it’s not shocking pink. I’ll see the stone myself this weekend or the next.

Ma and bua also claim to have learned a lot, and are threatening to abandon their regular jobs and become material science professors.

This is only the beginning, of course. Big fights over walls- bricks, paint, wallpaper- not to mention windows, doors, what sort of carpets to cover the marble with, if at all- these are inevitable. Watch this space.

Even Preity Zinta can’t get me out of this mess: dt/dt = exp(-t)

The above equation looks meaningless whether you have done calculus or not, but it’s true. What it means is that as the semester passes, time starts moving slower and slower. And thirty days before the semester ends, the rate of flow of time crosses a significant limit. Time slows down so much that you can feel it wash over you like viscous German chocolate.

In direct contrast, the first two months of of the semester move like, well, non-viscous German chocolate down Manasvini’s alimentary canal. Whether I stay at college or return home for weekends (or, in the case of my more degenerate days, the entire week), time passes by in a flash.

It’s got me depressed. I spend the last thirty days of the semester studying (yes, I do study- ignore the vile propaganda that has been spread about me) and anticipating my vacation. While time dilation has obvious advantages in that it triples the length of an hour, allowing me to finish my syllabus in one third of the time, it also triples the length of time I have to wait before I can start spending pleasant and instructive mornings (and afternoons, and evenings, and nights- but especially nights) with my friends. That is agony.

But, there are certain advantages that could be drawn out of this. Time travel springs to mind.

Rohan Deuskar, the columnist at www.freshlimesoda.com once suggested that ladies rooms, by the simple virtue of being ladies rooms are time vortex engines where time dilates in a particular geographical area. A semester also seems to be a time vortex engine, where time dilates over time.

If you could combine a semester and a ladies room after figuring out the physics behind the whole thing, you could have a time machine. It wouldn’t be as dangerous as all that mucking about with Improbability Factors, and it would possibly be cheaper than a Bistromathic drive.

Any takers?

• Balram and Shekhar will clean toilets.- Icon (Quotes 1:16)
• 98% of constipation patients don’t give a shit.- The Spoon Guy (Quotes 1:45)
• um i prefer the privacy of my own bathroom- dks916 (Quotes 9:12)
• no, I didn’t say “Too The Loo”- kMac (Quotes 11:15)
• Ishaanji was pissing away to all glory- kMac (Quotes 13:19)
• I was but a wee lass of 5 (I mean ‘wee’ literally, I trickled everywhere)- novocaine (Quotes 13:33)

If you’ve been reading recent Fillets, you would know that my house is going to be reconstructed- broken down and rebuilt with new floor plans, new rooms, and new functionality. It’s a very expensive equivalent of an almost total code rewrite.

Yesterday, I accompanied my mother to Greater Kailash-II’s M-block market to inspect bathroom fittings. It was a pleasant and instructive experience.

Bathrooms are arguably the most important rooms a house can have. You start the day there and end the day there. This is not to detract from the importance of the kitchen, but let us face it- bathrooms are of prime importance. You cleanse yourself there- insides and outsides. Your own insides and outsides, that is, not the bathrooms. Cleansing yourself outside a bathroom, while adventurous, is something I would not really recommend.

The bathroom sees you through sickness- especially diarrhoea- and health. It’s where I do most of my reading, and thus enrich myself with noble thoughts. To unburden yourself of what you ate the previous evening, while at the same time unburdening yourself of your worries by reading Saki is heaven itself. As for showers- I have already discussed in great detail how delightful they are in W-Fillet #13.

To see the finest bathroom tiles and accessories on display yesterday, then, was pure joy.

One of the remarkable innovations I saw yesterday was a glass basin, something I would think twice about having in a bathroom. It looks beautiful- an exquisite example of craftsmanship that lets light play over and through it- but once it’s in the bathroom, you’re going to be looking at your pipes through it. No, it’s good old porcelain for my bathroom. And considering the glass basins start at nine kilorupees, that’s pretty much a final decision.

On the other hand, if I manage to get into IIM and bring home fat pay packets every month, I wouldn’t mind keeping it in my bedroom for ornamental purposes.

Moving right along, to bathroom tiles.

Flooring is a major hassle these days. My bua is inistent on marble, so the entire ground floor is going to be done in marble- at 300 rupees a square foot. But what the heck, you might as well spend on the place where you’re going to stay.

My mum, though, hates marble. She’s comfortable with tiles, but what she really wants is wood or Italian Pergo tiles that resemble wood. However, after doing an entire floor in marble, there might not be that much money to do more than one room in wood. So, the first floor will probably be either cheaper marble- onyx, or regular tile. However, until that’s decided it won’t be possible to finalise on bathroom tiles for flooring or for walls. Such is life.

Tentatively, though, there are these options- white and green onyx, or aqua tiles. I wouldn’t mind lemon tiles, though. They look quite pleasant.

If it’s aqua tiles in the long run, I’d like to have a single bright sunflower yellow tile next to the mirror. Looking at a nice sunny tile first thing in the morning while you’re brushing is the sort of thing that kickstarts your day. If it’s marble instead of tile, I could paint the door yellow. This’ll be worked out as we progress through the reconstruction. But there’ll definitely be a splash of yellow. Or even shocking pink.

What comes next? Oh yes, commodes.

Twin flush commodes have finally made their way to India. You know- the sort that have two flush settings- water saving for normal circumstances, and extra-power for when you’ve had Chinese food the night before. There was also a Japanese model on display- it had two rotary knobs to control bidet flow for, well, washing your bum. It came with instructions, too- ‘If the washing is not successful, please adjust sitting position for optimal wash’. Ahem. I think I’ll stick with a plain model, possibly with twin flush.

There’s a particular brand of commode whose name I’ve forgotten- American Standard, perhaps- that comes with a lifetime warranty. The salesman claims that there are houses in Jor Bagh where these commodes have been in continuous service for more than forty years- an uptime record that even Linux servers would be hard pressed to match. The idea of a commode that outlives you is certainly an appealing one- a story could be spun out of it- the commode that saw four generations and the stories it could tell.

I should stop now, but I won’t.

Showers- I wouldn’t mind an enclosed shower. It’s a lot more pleasing than just letting the water splash all over the bathroom- something that violates the object oriented concept of containership. If water is meant for the shower, it should fall within the shower tray- not on the floor or the slab. And besides, with an enclosed shower, you’ll get a more concentrated and joyous bathing experience.

There was this delightful model available for 225 kilorupees. Twelve strategically located shower heads for a full body shower, a seat, a foot massager, and inbuilt CD/ FM Radio Audio. Wow. Another object of desire to push on to the things-to-buy-when-I’m-filthy-rich stack. For now, though, a simple square shower tray, and if I’m lucky, an enclosure to go with it.

And now, since I’ve exhausted the topic, I will stop.

This makes me sick.

HDFC Bank is offering to donate five rupees to charity for every valid email address or phone number you send them. So, not satisfied with spamming it’s own clientele, it now wants them to turn in their friends and family. It’s positively Stalinesque. Ashcroftian. Disgusting.

I could rant about why it stinks so much, but Madman has already done it  here. I suggest you check it out. But of course that’s only a suggestion.

The following options are now open to me:

1. Stop banking with them- close my account and send them a stiff letter telling them I refuse to place my trust in a bank that uses unethical practices to harvest email addresses and mobile numbers
2. If Zimbu the Webhost Monkey permits me to do so- create two hundred email addresses at aadisht.net, set all of them to forward to the HDFC Bank Marketing Director’s email, and send them all to this scheme. Charity will get a kilorupee, and the idiot who dreamed up this scheme or approved it will get a taste of his own medicine.
3. If Zimbu doesn’t let me create two hundred email addresses that do nothing, write a simple script that emails a stiff letter to the HDFC marketing director every time you load the page. This has the advantage of being ‘hardly a ten minutes job’.
4. And if I want to be really nasty, set that script to reload itself, so that it’ll send an email every second, and not stop until you close the window manually.

Advice, anybody? I’m definitely closing my account once the semester ends.

As I mentioned a few Fillets ago, Punjabi people are rather enamoured of Mirza and Sahiban. I don’t mean literally that they’re in love with people who died one thousand years ago, the point I’m trying to get across is that they’re rather obsessed with the legend. The legend is one of the focal points of Punjabi culture, much like butter chicken and sardars.

Thus, the song by Punjabi MC isn’t the only one about Mirza- there are hundreds. At least, there appear to be. Just as music shops at dhabas and other truck stops have two separate stalls- one for Chamkila cassettes and one for albums by other artists- if you ask a Sardar with a writer to burn you a CD with “Mirza and some other good Punjabi songs”, he will give you two CDs- one full of songs with Mirza in the title, one full of other songs. You will then have to listen to all hundred Mirzas on the first CD in an effort to find out which is the one you want, and probably start liking five others by the time you’ve found it.

Another, more localised fallout of the Mirza mythos is manifested in the recent behaviour of Param Pal Singh and Sushil Manohar Dogra aka Jammu, both of whom are in love with the same girl- a hairy sardarni with the wit and personality of a grizzly bear. While one cannot really blame Param Pal for doing so- he is, after all, a sardar, and can’t really help it- Jammu can really not be excused.

Anyway, back to the point. Proving that wishful thinking is alive and well, Param Pal has taken to calling Dogra Mirza in hopes that he too will be beaten up by a squadron of outraged relatives. What Dogra calls Param Pal in retaliation is unprintable.

With the fervour that Mirza arouses, it should come as no surprise then that in W-Fillets #19: Mirza angry Punjabis have posted angry comments- or as Asim calls them, Filloments.

A gentleman who calls himself ‘kick some a**’ has corrected my account, saying that there were no sticks involved, Mirza was a genuinely good archer, the only relatives involved were Sahiba’s cousins, and they did not number two thousand.

He then goes on to accuse me of being sarcastic.

Well, duh.

The whole point of the W-Fillets is sarcasm. Sarcasm is one of their chief virtues. If I were to follow kick some a**’s no doubt well-intentioned advice and research folklore instead of being sarcastic- what would then differentiate the W-Fillets from a PhD on Punjabi folklore? Absolutely nothing. People would delete them from their inboxen without ever reading them, and my twin goals of spreading sweetness and light and world domination would never bear fruit. No, kick some a**, I must disagree with you gently but firmly. The sarcasm shall stay.

But enough on sarcasm. The most astonishing thing is that kick some a** has said that a non-negative EQ, not IQ is required to appreciate the story of Mirza.

While I would be the last person to deny this, I cannot help be bewildered that Punjabi chauvinists are aware of the concept of IQ, much less EQ. I would have thought that the worship of such Punjabi icons as Mirza, Gul Panag, and Anchal Kumar (who are some of the other Punjabis kick some a** holds up for emulation) would leave little time for an expansion of knowledge about various personality metrics.

But then, you learn something new everyday.

People say India doesn’t progress because Indians don’t break out of their Third World mentality.

This is true. Chocolates are the best example.

In the First World, chocolates are huge. Chocolate bars are about three inches wide, and a foot long. Europeans take chocolate seriously. So do Australians. Americans don’t. Their chocolates are big, but the quality of cocoa is terrible.

Indians don’t take chocolate seriously at all.

The Third World mentality ensures that chocolate is regarded as a luxury item. So, to get people to buy it, it is sold in tiny packs of five rupees. The latest invention is the liquid chocolate stick- a travesty that retails for one rupees and gives you less than a single mouthful of chocolate.

When Cadbury’s launched Temptations almost two years ago, I was delighted. It was advertised as being of international quality. I found it to be so, too. The chocolate was richer and more flavourful than usual. The flavours and embedded fruits and nuts were delicious.

As always, the bar itself was too small.

When you buy a Temptations, you see the package and say- ‘What Ho! An international quality chocolate of international size!’.

When you open it, you are disillusioned. The apparent width is made up by cardboard. The chocolate itself is two bars thick- no more than a standard Dairy Milk. It was very disappointing.

Hope, however, has recently floated in the form of the Cadbury’s Chunky variants- they’re not very long, but they’re thick. A lot of bang for your buck. And, wonders, the cocoa content seems to have improved even in the standard chocolates. Standard chocolates are evolving.

Could this be a sign of progress? Does this mean that India is finally shedding off it’s baggage and moving into the future? Or is my metric of development hopelessly inaccurate?

I apologise for not posting, or writing. Here’s the reason. I had diarrhoea.

Diarrhoea is practically the worst disease you can have when you’re at home. You miss classes that you should really be attending. That’s something not all that new for me, but there’s this difference- when I have diarrhoea, I can’t take advantage of being at home and eat good food. No, I’m stuck with Electral, nimbu pani, and khichdi.

Apparently, diarrhoea is not very good for eloquence either.

I’m fine now, thank you very much. Your e-mails will be replied to. And if you haven’t sent me any e-mail to reply to- that’s your fault.

All right. One of the important things that happened while I was invalided was that I reread the Uncle Fred Omnibus (by PG Wodehouse) during my period of sickness. You can guess where I did the reading.

After doing this, I have been inspired to follow in the footsteps of Uncle Fred himself, and go about spreading sweetness and light.

Of course, this will mean breaking my New Year’s Resolution of not interfering in other peoples’ lives more than once, but I’m willing to do that. After all, it’s only a resolution- not a project or operation or anything really serious.

Right now I’m thinking I need a resolution to write more coherent, organised Fillets.

So I’ll end this one right now, before it rambles any more.

It is quite conceivable that the last Fillet has been making some of you think I’m a smarmy git who has no right to be so cheerful when you yourselves are wallowing in depression, angst, and misery.

We could go into why you lot have no right to be wallowing in depression, angst and misery considering your circumstances are so much better than mine, but we won’t. I’ll just say that I have a perfect right to be cheerful, because fate, my guardian angel, or a ‘divinity that oversees the affairs of men’ has been working overtime in my behalf.

A couple of weeks ago, the Supreme Court settled the legal status of Sainik Farms once and for all. Sainik Farms was originally allotted to retired defence personnel to actually set up farms in. Thus, all the land is to be turned over to people who actually fall in that category in the next year, otherwise it’ll be confiscated, the construction will be razed down, and you’ll be kicked out.

This is rather hard luck on the people who already live there, but I’m sure they’ll adjust. The important point is- we are not moving out. Whee!

Since then, we have swung around again to the original plan, which was to reconstruct the original house. For the past two weeks we have been looking at and rejecting various plans (architects’ plans, not projects), and today we finally settled on a Final Grand Plan, the details of which shall follow soon.

So the house is going to be broken down, and we’ll have to find alternative accommodation for about four months. Not just for ourselves- we’ll adjust as we always do- but also for our vast collection of books, who shall need temporary homes for the time being. Anybody interested in taking them in?

I hate to disappoint Ishaan once again, but the reconstruction will not involve explosives in any way. But I’m sure that in about a year, there’ll be enough of those at Sainik Farms.

The W-Fillets are famous for being funny, but also infamous for being cheerful. Those of you who have had the pleasure of my acquaintance know that I am bitter and cynical, and drip acid when I speak. I am prone to attacks of depression, and have exploded with rage more than once. However, ever since I entered Uttarayana last October, I have been Pollyanna-like in my cheery enthusiasm. Or, to take a more classical analogy, like Colin the security robot in Mostly Harmless. What? It’s a classic.

There is news. Whether it is good or bad news depends on whether you like the new and Uttarayana-enabled Aadisht or not. The dogged, unflagging, almost mindless cheeriness is about to multiply.

Yesterday, I saw a poster of The Hero in the window of the local gift and greetings shop. It was a poster printed and distributed by Archies- a content and retail chain that I have come to hate over the past three years for the mindless sludge it churns out, and for its symbiotic relationships with Shah Rukh Khan and Britney Spears. But this poster had a redeeming feature. No. Not redeeming. Much beyond redeeming. A saving, beatifying, and canonising feature. It was a poster of Preity Zinta.

I went in and plonked down my sity rupees. The kindly sardar behind the counter took down the poster, rolled it up, and secured it with newspaper and sticky tape. Another fifteen rupees spent on chewing gum to stick it up with, and the preparations were complete. Twenty minutes later, the poster was on the wall opposite my bed, and as a bonus, I had enough chewing gum to last me two or three weeks.

By now you’ll be asking yourselves what the hell this has to do with being cheerful. I’ll elain. It’s simple, really.

I have already elaborated on the importance of breakfasts and bathing (See The W-Fillets #5: The Most Important Meal of the Day and The W-Fillets #13: Cold Showers). If you get a good breakfast and bath at the beginning of the day, the rest of the day is bound to go well. The day starts off in a positive direction and keeps gathering momentum.

Breakfasts and baths are all but nonexistent at the hostel. But none of that matters any more, now that the first thing I see when I wake up on weekday morning’s is Preity Zinta’s dimples.

Preity Zinta’s dimples start from just above the line of her upper lip and proceed downwards until they reach Antarctica, where they tell the penguins funny stories. Once can study them for hours on end and still not gain a complete understanding- as with the Mona Lisa’s smile, or a course on analog circuits. They are facial features, true, but only superficially. I prefer to think of them as direct proof of the existence of a kind and merciful God who wants all of us to be happy. Or at the very least, a divinity that wants me to be cheerful.

With divine backing, I can only get more and more cheerful. Perhaps, at some point in the not-too-distant future, I will spark off an outpouting of joy and goodwill, the way Haley Joel Osment did in Pay It Forward. Assuming, of course, that cheeriness is as contagious as stupidity.

Paulo Coelho, says it is, and who am I to argue with Paulo Coelho?

I’m still in Delhi. I felt lazy and decided to take the train tomorrow morning.

Yesterday, after a very bad time spent with some screwball relatives, I went with my family for South Indian food at Naivedyam in Hauz Khas village. After that, we went to nearby Aurobindo Market to buy books at Midlands.

To be accurate, just me and my brother did that. My parents first went back home to drop off my grandmother and bua, and then came back. But before coming to Midlands, they first spent some time buying clothes. This gave me and Bhavya the opportunity to have a nice long browse.

Midland truly hit the jackpot yesterday. We spent over two kilorupees on the following things:

1. Bend It Like Beckham DVD
2. Lean Six Sigma
3. Discover Your Sales Strengths
4. The BusinessWorld guide to B-schools
5. Dave Barry: Hits Below the Beltway
6. Making the Minister Smile, by Anurag Mathur
7. A thriller by William Diehl whose name I forget
8. Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett
9. The Rainbow and the Rose, by Nevil Shute
10. Mastermind India 4

Only the fact that Midlands had still to receive it’s shipment of Gotham comics- the Indian syndication of MAD, X-Men, Spider-man, DC Comics Presents, Hulk, and the like- prevented me from plonking down a further one hundred and fifty rupees for that month’s comics and five hundred and forty for the quarter’s super specials.

Sober reflection also made me realise that Harry Potter V would eventually come out in paperback, and waiting for a while rather than plonking down six hundred and thirty-five rupees for advance booking would not only be fiscally prudent, but also good for the soul.

Be that as it may, the fact remains that my family purchased over two thousand rupees worth of intellectual property in a little less than thirty minutes. This may not seem like a lot when you convert it into dollars- but books are much cheaper in India than anywhere else. Even then, people don’t buy them in such quantities as we did yesterday. My father admits himself that he would rarely spend so freely on anything else- clothes, or even food- but books are special.

So, if you’re a stranger reading this, and you’re ever in Midlands and you see the guy behind the desk smiling with delight- say hi to everyone else in the shop. One of them will probably be a Khanna.